Sunday, October 19, 2014

In its news section the New York Times is spinning the Ebola
story to make President Obama look good. John Podhoretz documents the
dereliction.

But then, this morning we turn to the opinion section and
discover Frank Bruni offering a clear, cogent, fair analysis of the failings of
the Obama administration’s handling of the Ebola crisis.

Bruni is no a right winger, so we assume that he would be
more inclined to support than to criticize the president.

And yet, he writes:

Before
President Obama’s election, we had Iraq, Katrina and the meltdown of banks
supposedly under Washington’s watch. Since he came along to tidy things up,
we’ve had the staggeringly messy rollout of Obamacare, the damnable negligence
of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the baffling somnambulism of the
Secret Service.

Now
this. Although months of a raging Ebola epidemic in West Africa gave the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sufficient warning and ample time to
get ready for any cases here, it was caught flat-footed, as its director, Tom
Frieden, is being forced bit by bit to acknowledge. Weeks ago he assured us:
“We are stopping Ebola in its tracks in this country.” Over recent days he
updated that assessment, saying that “in retrospect, with 20/20 hindsight,”
federal officials could and should have done more at the Texas Health
Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas.

That was just a warm-up. Bruni continues:

Ebola
is his presidency in a petri dish. It’s an example already of his tendency to
talk too loosely at the outset of things, so that his words come back to haunt
him. There was the doctor you could keep under his health plan until, well, you
couldn’t. There was the red line for Syria that he didn’t have to draw and
later erased.

With
Ebola, he said almost two weeks ago that “we’re doing everything that we can”
with an “all-hands-on-deck approach.” But on Wednesday and Thursday he
announced that there were additional hands to be put on deck and that we could
and would do more. The shift fit his pattern: not getting worked up in the
early stages, rallying in the later ones.

It’s
more understandable in this case than in others, because when it comes to
statements about public health, the line between adequately expressed concern
and a license for hysteria is thin and not easily determined. Still, he has to
make Americans feel that he understands their alarm, no matter how irrational
he deems it, and that they’re being leveled with, not talked down to, not
handled. And he has a ways to go.

“If you
were his parent, you’d want to shake him,” said one Democratic strategist, who
questioned where Obama’s passion was and whether, even this deep into his
presidency, he appreciated one of the office’s most vital functions: deploying
language, bearing, symbols and ceremony to endow Americans with confidence in
who’s leading them and in how they’re being led.

Ouch.

If this is what your friends are saying about you, you don’t
need enemies.